MotionPhysics: Learnable Motion Distillation for Text-Guided Simulation

Accurately simulating existing 3D objects and a wide variety of materials often demands expert knowledge and time-consuming physical parameter tuning to achieve the desired dynamic behavior. We introduce MotionPhysics, an end‑to‑end differentiable framework that infers plausible physical parameters from a user-proved natural language prompt for a chosen 3D scene of interest, removing the need for guidance from ground‑truth trajectories or annotated videos. Our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model to estimate material parameter values, which are constrained to be within plausible ranges. We further propose a learnable motion distillation loss, which extracts robust motion priors from pretrained video diffusion models while minimizing appearance and geometry inductive biases to guide the simulation. We evaluate MotionPhysics across more than thirty scenarios, including real-world, human-designed, and AI-generated 3D objects, spanning a wide range of materials such as elastic solids, metals, foams, sand, and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. We demonstrate that it produces visually realistic dynamic simulations guided by natural language, surpassing the state of the art, with physically plausible parameters that are automatically determined. The code is available in the supplemental material and will be made publicly available upon publication.